CHAPTER 5
Roads to Revolution, 1750–1776
n the evening of March 5, 1770, an angry crowd of poor and working-class OBostonians gathered in front of the guard post outside the Boston cus- toms house. The crowd was protesting a British soldier’s abusive treatment a few hours earlier of a Boston apprentice who was trying to collect a debt from a British officer. Suddenly, shots rang out. When the smoke had cleared, four Bostonians lay dead, and seven more were wounded, one mortally. Among those in the crowd was an impoverished twenty-eight-year- old shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes. Hewes had already witnessed, and once experienced, abuses by British troops, but the appalling violence of the “Boston Massacre,” as the shooting became known, led Hewes to political activism. Four of the five who died were personal friends, and he himself received a serious blow to the shoulder from a soldier’s rifle butt. Over the next several days, Hewes attended meetings and signed peti- tions denouncing British conduct in the shooting, and he later testified against the soldiers. Thereafter he participated prominently in such anti- CHAPTER OUTLINE British actions as the Boston Tea Party. The Triumph of the British Empire, How was it that four thousand British troops were stationed on the 1750–1763 streets of Boston—a city of sixteen thousand—in 1770? What had brought those troops and the city’s residents to the verge of war? What led obscure, Imperial Revenues and Reorganization, humble people like George Robert Twelves Hewes to become angry political 1760–1766 Resistance Resumes, 1766–1770